Messaging between people has become a very important factor in the Internet. Messaging itself can be divided into two general subcategories: offline messaging and online messaging. Offline messaging refers to solutions in which there is not an online or real-time connection between two or more parties. Examples of the most used offline messaging solutions comprise emails, short messages of a mobile communication network etc. Online messaging refers to solutions in which two or more parties may interact via a data communication network essentially in real-time. A more common term for online messaging is instant messaging. Instant messaging is a form of real-time communication between two or more parties based on typed text or speech. The text or speech is conveyed via computers or mobile terminals connected over a network such as the Internet.
In practice instant messaging requires the use of a client program. The client program is in contact with an instant messaging service or instant messaging server. One of the most common features of instant messaging services is that they offer presence information that indicates if people on one's list of contacts are currently online in the instant messaging service. Examples of instant messaging service include AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Skype, Google Talk, .NET Messenger Service etc. The advantage of the instant message service compared e.g. to emails is that the parties usually are able to know whether the peer is available.
Although disclosed above, the parties of instant messaging service need not always be ‘all humans’. A software agent (sometimes referred to as a ‘bot’) may interact with other network services intended of people as it were a person. The bot may e.g. be used to gather information.
U.S. 2006/0156063 (Mazzarella et al) discloses a system and method that allow an instant messaging user device to conduct transactions with transaction systems that do not natively allow instant messaging inputs or message processing. An intermediate functionality translates or transforms instant messaging messages from the user device into non-instant messaging communications that can be processed by the transaction system and translates or transforms non-instant messaging communications from the translation system into instant messaging communications for the user device.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,430,602 (Active Buddy) discloses a method and system for interactively responding to queries from a remotely located user includes a computer server system configured to receiving an instant message query or request from the user over the Internet. The query or request is interpreted and appropriate action is taken, such as accessing a local or remote data resource and formulating an answer to the user's query. The answer is formatted as appropriate and returned to the user as an instant message or via another route specified by the user. A method and system of providing authenticated access to a given web page via instant messaging is also disclosed.
The prior art solutions, however, have drawbacks. Prior art scripts of agents, that is, transactions bots, are static with limited input possibilities. If a script needs to be changed, this has to be made manually to take into account possible user errors that are experienced or language that is not understood. Furthermore, a user has a limited way to interact with a back-end system that executes the transaction.
Based on the above there is an obvious need for a solution that would mitigate and/or alleviate the above drawbacks.